Blogging Roller

I've been reading the Harry Potter books to my older boys since Christmas time and, now, we're speeding through the Prisoner of Azkaban, hoping to finish in time to catch the movie at the IMAX theater. The other day, the boys were drooling over the Harry Potter goodies in the Lego catalog and reading the blurbs next to each of the Potter Lego sets. Each set is based on some event in the book and the blurbs reveal all sorts of spoilers, plot-points like... uh... well, I guess I shouldn't say. Alas, my boys have been spoilered.

One of the things that makes kids movies fun is the two-level appeal. The movie makers try to throw in some adult humor that passes right over the kids heads or they make some pop-culture reference that, generally speaking, only adults will catch. The problem here is that kids can become "pre-referenced." That is, they get exposed to a pop culture reference before they experience the actual pop culture being referered to. For example, in Toy Story 2, Buzz Lightyear learns that the evil Zurg is his father, which, of course, is a reference to Star Wars. Now, when my boys see Empire Strikes Back, they are going to think "what a lame rip off of Toy Story 2."

Yep, that's what Dads worry about. Thanks for reading. I think that fulfils my quota for random nonsense this week.

Thanks to Mark Pilgrim for help with this list:

• Perl
• C#
• Visual Basic
• JavaScript
• Objective C
• Perl, PHP, and Bash
• Java (under development)
• Java

Do not pass up the chance to hear Gilad Bracha, Sun's Computational Theologist. A co-worker and I attended his 10:30PM BOF talk on Generics last night and enjoyed every minute. He is sarcastic, cynical, brilliant, and funny as hell. He was responding to audience questions with answers like "you really should be careful with those drugs and I wish you a speedy and complete recovery" and "this is all a tissue of lies, I promise you." You had to be there to get the full impact, of course, so next time he speaks, make sure you are.

As you can see, so far, I have not been able to blog much of JavaOne. I just haven't have the time. The talks last all day long and run right through lunch. The Birds of a Feather sessions run until just past midnight. Blogging is not the only thing I haven't been doing. I haven't taken any pictures, I haven't collected any vendor schwag, I haven't done any sight-seeing, and I haven't been staying out all night drinking. I have been enjoying the technical sessions and taking some notes, so perhaps I'll post a trip report here once the conference is over.

Whenever I'm away from my boys, even for a couple of days, I find that when we are re-united, the little guys look like they've each grown a year. Andi sent me the picture below and, sure enough, Leo (who just turned 2) is looking like such a big boy and not the baby that he was only the week before.

JavaOne is fun, but I miss that little guy (and you guys too, Alex and Linus).

I knew that Project Looking Glass was going to become open source software, but I was a little surprised to hear Scott McNealy mention, during his JavaOne keynote, that it would be released under GPL. Was that a slip up?

Tim Bray says that it's no big deal that Sun's Chief Operating Officer is blogging, but it is a pretty big deal to me as he is using Roller. Now, if only James Gosling would give up his home grown blog software and move over to blogs.sun.com I could die a happy man ;-)

The blogger meet-up was great fun and it was great to put faces to so many names, as they say. I'm not going to try to list all of the bloggers that showed up, I'm still dragging from the IPAs I consumed, but I will link to Raible when he does that.

Lots of good news concerning David and Mark today as Apple announces that they will be bundling the Blojsom blog software with Apple OS X Server.

Today's JSF talk was so jam packed that I could not get in and now I'm sitting in a talk about the Netbeans rich client platform, which is less than half full. Oh well. I've seen three talks on JSF from David Geary in the past couple of months, so I probably know more than I need to know about JSF, especially since I am not using at work on in Roller (yet).

Still being on east coast time, I couldn't sleep past about 5:30AM this mornning. I headed down to Moscone early to finish planning my JavaOne session schedule. By 8AM, the people started streaming in an the wireless network went to hell in a hurry. I joined the crowd in the main session hall. I guess I have never really been to a big conference because the number of people here, the endless ocean of Java developers, is just overwhelming. Despite that, when I sat down in the hall, I found that I was sitting directly in front of Simon Brown and Sam Dalton.

The opening session was better than I expected because I was expecting marking fluff. The Jonathan Schwartz and the other execs did dish out the fluff and the goofy marketing humor, but it was pretty high-quality and well thought-out fluff. The theme was the ubiquity of Java, with a focus on the non-traditional platforms like smart cards, mobile phones, and automobiles. The message was that, if you want the code that you write to make the most impact, to run on the greatest number of devices, then you've got to be coding to the Java platform. I think they did a good job getting this message accross.

At one point, they started talking about appealing to the Visual Basic type developers and making Java easier to use. They put the word FREE up on the wall in giant letters and they started talking about Java Studio Creator. Turns out, only the 30 day trial is free and on the next slide the word FREE was replaced with $49.95. If you buy a one year subscription to the Sun Developer Network (SDN), then you'll get Creator. During JavaOne you can buy SDN for a special price of $49.95 for one year. I think these prices are fair, but I absolutely hate it when a company proclaims that a product is FREE, but then turns around and tells you that freedom only lasts 30 days. I've heard it a million times, but still, it never fails to piss me off.

Graham Hamilton's Bill Shannon's overview of the J2SE 1.5 Tiger release and Tiger's children was the best part of the morning session. After some markeing inspired goofiness involving a tiny toger cub, he gave a great overview of Tiger. He covered the Shared VM concept, the new look and feels, language ease-of-use features, and annotations. It struck me during this talk, that annotations could make a really major difference in the ways that we develop with Java. Before, we used marker interfaces and method naming patterns (getXXX, setXXX, etc.) to convey information to tools and runtime reflections, but now we'll start using attributes instead. New Java specs will define new attributes and individual Java developers can define new attributes as well. I wasn't planning on attending any of the Tiger talks this week, but Bill changed my mind about that.

That's all for now. I'm about to learn about "Using jvmstat and visualgc to Solve Memory Management Problems."

David Czarnecki: Good morning folks. Mark and I are pleased to announce somethingme.com. Just in time for Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference and JavaOne.

somethingme is a set of services for information creation, aggregation and exchange across devices, protocols, and services. The first available service allows you to interact with your blog via AOL(TM) Instant Messenger.

It took just about all day to get here and the last hour of the trip was the worst because I had to spend it in a hot airport shuttle, at the mercy of driver with questionable driving skills and the inability to remember fare that we had agreed upon. I checked into the hotel only to find that that internet access is an additional $14.95 per day. Don't they understand? Internet access wants to be free, or at least I want internet access to be free, unless, of course, I am selling internet access in which case I want it to be expensive. Anyhow, I guess I won't be spending much time in the room anyway. The conference goes all day everyday, the birds of a feather sessions don't end until almost midnight, and there is the whole city of San Francisco to be explored.

I'm in Moscone now, waiting to hook up with my co-workers. I haven't seen any familiar faces quite yet. I've got my laptop hooked up to a wall outlet and a nice JAVAONE wireless connection going. I will attempt to keep up this oh so fine quality blogging throughout the event, but I am not making any promises.

Elliot Rusty Harold: I just realized something: Java 1.5, being covered at JavaOne, is code named Tiger. Mac OS X 10.4, being announced across the hall in Moscone is code named Tiger. And I've heard a couple of hints that there's something big and unexpected being announced by Sun next week with regard to Java. Could there be some as yet unreleased big news about a Sun-Apple collaboration?

Prompted by the news of the Rome effort, I started taking a serious look at the various Java based Weblog and Wiki libraries last night. Starting with the list compiled by the Rome guys in What's wrong with other existing RSS parsing libraries, I started to build my own list. I expanded my list to include not only newsfeed parsing libraries, but also blog/wiki API server and client libraries. I also added a couple of clarifications and a couple of categories: 1) newsfeed parsing and producing, 2) server-side libraries, 3) client-side libraries.

It is interesting that there are two Atom API server libraries, but no Atom API client library (except for Gilmore which is just getting started). This illustrates the fact that the Atom API is new, still in flux, and interesting only to server developers at this point. Also interesting: all of the newsfeed parsing libraries parse news feeds as XML, there is no Java equavalent to Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser.

One question that crossed my mind: should Rome include a blogging client library? Posting, updating, and deleting posts via the XML-RPC based Blogger API or the REST-based Atom API is not exactly easy to do. Wouldn't it be nice to have a client library with an easy-to-use set of interfaces for this.

Here is my list of Open source Java libraries for Weblogs, Wikis, and Newsfeeds.:

• Informa - library for parsing and producing RSS, RDF, and very soon, Atom. Also includes database persistence layer. Established May 2002, under active development, latest release 0.5.
• Rome - library for parsing and producing all flavors of RSS and Atom. New effort started June 2004, latest release 0.2.
• RSSLibJ - primarily for generating RSS. Development stalled?
• RSS Utilities - JSP tags for parsing and displaying RSS presented in a java.net article.
• RSS4J - parser for RSS and RDF. Development stalled?
• FeedParser - Kevin Burton's parser, drives Newsmonster.

• Sandler - toolkit for implementing Atom API in a web application, includes an Atom parser. Used by Blojsom.
• Atom4J - toolkit for implementing Atom API in a web application, includes an Atom parser. Used by Roller.

• Gilmore - soon to be a full function Atom API client library, under development. Sister project to Sandler.
• Hula - client library for programming Wikis that implement WikiRPCInterface. Associated with JSPWiki
• Apache XML-RPC - good do-it-yourself starting point for implementing a Blogger API or a WikiRPCInterface client.